My Photos

This is Positively Eerie

Right now, I am reading a wonderful book by Daniel Silva, one of my favorite authors. It’s a thriller starring his Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon, and involves the theft of one painting, in the service of finding another famous painting by an Italian Old Master painter. One of the villains is the terrorist dictator of Syria (even though his name is never mentioned, and he never appears). In the telling of a story about a horrible massacre in Syria, Gabriel mentions a government photographer, whose smuggled photographs document the brutalities of the regime.

I also am an avid reader of the Wall Street Journal. A couple of weeks ago, the paper ran a story about that same photographer, and how he smuggled out of the country many of his photographs, before he defected to the West himself. Now Daniel Silva must have written his new novel at least a year ago (publishing cycle takes about that long), and I was flabbergasted to find the photographer’s story, which I had just read about in the WSJ. Definitely an eerie coincidence.